(As Nav and I prepare for a trip to Japan, you may notice something of a land-of-the-rising-sun theme creeping into these posts).
Although I lived in Japan for a year, I never saw the cherry blossoms. At new year 2011-12 I had taken an arduous - local train only (see the post on bullet trains) - trip up to Tokyo in the snow. There I had developed an infatuation with a Japanese American visiting his grandma and, when the Japanese cherries were about to bloom a few months later, I spent a lot of money I didn’t have in buying a flight all the way to New York to visit him at his university in Rhode Island. I later saw him in Newcastle and in Berlin. That tri-continental romance was beautiful while it lasted, but had no prospect of lasting long, even if it at 22 or 23 it may not have seemed so.
Thus it is with the cherry blossom.
Here are two verses by Bashō, one of the haiku greats:
Very brief –
Gleam of blossoms in the treetops
On a moonlit night.
And
A lovely spring night
suddenly vanished while we
viewed cherry blossoms
Their fleeting beauty means they bring with them a hopefulness before their season, a wistfulness during, a sense of regret and loss after. Kamikaze pilots would paint blossoms on their doomed planes. Here is a poem by a Vice-Admiral in the Imperial Japanese navy:
Today in flower,
Tomorrow scattered by the wind –
Such is our blossom life.
How can we think its fragrance lasts forever?
Let us dwell on the festive side, too, though. Something I think is oh-so civilised is the Japanese tradition of hanami, literally flower viewing, but really a boozy picnic under a flowering tree. What could be finer than rice balls and copious sake with falling petals all around? Nothing, says I. And it’s a game old tradition. I see something of myself in the lady described in this poem by Bashō:
drunk by cherry blossoms -
a lady wearing a haori coat
and a sword
But enough of this blossom hype. Probably my favourite Japanese poet is Kobayashi Issa, another of the greats, whose name literally means “Cup of Tea”. He is the most humorous of the poets, writing about lover cats, about snails climbing Mount Fuji and about living in poverty. In this poem, he bursts the high-fallutin’ blossom stuff (the cherries representing, I suppose, the show-off rich, and the grass the salt-of-the-earth people of his home province):
Where I’m from
The grass blooms as well…
Cherry blossoms
In the early part of the twentieth century, the Japanese government gifted a forest of cherry saplings to the US government which still line the malls and monuments of DC. On my transpacific tryst, we visited the White House and, by happy accident, I got to meet the then President, shaking his hand under one of those blossoms. Obama. Talk about fleeting hope.
Cherry Blossoms. I love Cherry Blossoms.